TALLADEGA, Ala. – The Talladega Superspeedway infield can be a humbling place.

It can also be a wild place, the type that, in Tom T. Hall’s lyrics, “one would not want to write Mother about.”

I spent much of Friday evening among the bohemians there. An old teammate was camping out, just as he was the last time the Sprint Cup Series wandered into Alabama, and I joined him at his campsite inside turn two. There I enjoyed supper and played a few songs I had written. Then the local community came together to sing karaoke for quite some time. When appropriate – the songs of Journey do not coincide with my field of expertise – I enthusiastically joined in.

I took part in this beer-soaked fellowship with campers from two miles away, but the cultural exchange also included visitors from Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana.

The experience was instructive in terms of relating to what fans are thinking. People who rough it in the Talladega infield – and actually pay for the right to do so – qualify as NASCAR fans of the first order.

“There’s nothing like it when they all scream by,” said my old friend from high school, Jimmy Miller, who plans to watch the Good Sam 500 from atop a scaffold. “I used to sit in the grandstands. I wouldn’t go back there if you gave me tickets.”

It’s so tempting for sports writers to hang out with other sports writers, not to mention drivers with other drivers, broadcasters with other broadcasters, and so on. This is functional, in part, because it gives them a great opportunity to celebrate how important they all are.

What everyone overestimates is the notion that everyone pays attention to them. I got to know about 15 fans, and the only one who’d ever heard of me used to receive footballs I snapped between my legs.

Many race fans, from all over the country and, in rare instances, around the world, read columns such as this one. Some NASCAR fans devote a considerable amount of time to reading every available paragraph about their favorite sport.

But lots of fans just love to go see the races. They can’t afford to go every week so they watch on TV, but their interest in NASCAR is not fueled by intellectual pursuit. It’s fueled by the pursuit of one driver by a bunch of others. They don’t know that Brad Keselowski is from Rochester Hills, Mich., or that Tony Stewart loves to go fishing, or that Ryan Newman and wife Krissie are vitally interested in animal rescue. They don’t know who Robert Richardson or Timmy Hill is.